Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva

Breaking with arte povera in the early 1970s, Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti renamed himself Alighiero & Boetti, legally bifurcating his identity to reflect opposing or unresolved aspects of his oeuvre (e.g., the antinomies of order and chaos, West and East, authorial ego and collective processes) as well as his split relationship to the world as an artist. For this exhibition, curator Achille Bonito Oliva (in collaboration with the Boetti Archive and the Alighiero e Boetti Foundation) will assemble some seventy of the artist’s tapestries, maps, pieces of mail art, sculptures, and paintings. The installation’s circular arrangement promises to challenge any linear progression of retrospective narrative and reveal the story of a “singular” artist’s becoming “plural.” So, it appears, Oliva is proposing Boetti as a Deleuzian artist exemplar.

— David Rimanelli